Everyday Ethics

Here’s what the business world doesn’t need: Another high-sounding “code of ethics.”

Some of these read like a cross between the The Night Before Christmas, a smarmy pre-school set of rules about “being nice” , and the Ten Commandments with all of the reality stripped out.  People are urged in a lofty way to “be good for goodness’ sake.”  Whether captured in an actual “code” or in a vision/values statement, the words have the interesting dual capacity of being both too high-brow to relate to actual life on the ground and too nitty-gritty to relate to all of the ways in which things can go south.

Often these are captured or expanded upon in policy and procedure manuals, an ever-growing volume (or set of volumes) that attempt to cover all of the ways in which people can do wrong (or careless, or stupid, or whatever).  When the government does it, it becomes 250,000 people engaged full time in writing rules and a thousand or more pages added to the Federal Register every year.  Whoever does it, the more the volume the less the meaning, expecially since a lot of the effort involves making and justifying exceptions to the code/policy/procedure/rule.

This is why we at Luma talk abou everyday ethics.  What are everyday ethics?  They’re ethics that address things that can happen every day, violate people’s sense of right every day, waste resources every day, destroy the possibilities of the organization every day, produce mediocrity every day.  Things like focusing on the wrong (or even bad) priorities, drowning people in distractions, allowing internal warfare and destructive competition, burying truth (top-down, bottom-up, side-to-side), letting greed prevail over serving people successfully.  I addressed these and more in my book High-Performance Ethics, where the main guideline was to talk about ethics that are critical to having team integrity that leads to better results. 

There is a place for lofty prose, but too often the prose is all we get.  Talk is cheap.  Action is the proof of the pudding.  Is this ethic something that relates to real human beings with real strengths and weaknesses, living in organizations with real opportunities and challenges?  If so, it’s worth talking about.  If not, we should save it for the next conversation we have with a cleric or philosopher.

Even they would do better talking about everyday ethics.

• Comments